Title Analysis of Productivity Differences in Steel Bridge Manufacturing Plants According to Resource Allocation Methods for the Bottleneck
Authors Lee, Jaeil ; Jeong, Eunji ; Jeong, Keunchae
DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.6106/KJCEM.2023.24.2.037
Page pp.37-49
ISSN 2005-6095
Keywords Modular; Steel Bridge; Productivity; Bottleneck; Resource Allocation; Simulation
Abstract In this study, we proposed resource allocation methodologies to improve the productivity of steel bridge manufacturing plants based on the constraint theory which is very popular in the area of manufacturing industries. To this end, after defining the painting process as a bottleneck, three resource allocation methodologies were developed: Operation Specific Resource Allocation (OSRA), Product Specific Resource Allocation (PSRA), and General Resource Allocation (GRA). As a result of experiments for performance evaluation using a simulation model of the steel bridge supply chain, GRA showed the best performance in terms of the Number of Work-In-Process (NWIP) and Waiting Time (WT), in particular, as workload itself and its variability were increased, the performance gap with the specific resource allocation became further deepened. On average, GRA reduced NWIP by 36.2% and WT by 34.6% compared to OSRA, and reduced NWIP by 71.0% and WT by 70.4% compared to PSRA. The reduction of NWIP and WT means alleviating the bottleneck of the painting process, which eventually means that the productivity of the steel bridge manufacturing plant has improved.